October 14, 2004, Thursday

It was 1960. And Eddie Dees realized that the bigger-the-better axiom that governed much of consumer electronics was about to be set on its ear when he first saw the KLH Model 8. It was a high fidelity vacuum-tube-bearing FM radio that was barely as...

October 14, 2004, Thursday

Here, in the heart of the desert, is a watermelon patch like no other. After years of crossing different breeds of watermelons, scientists who long ago eliminated the dark seeds have now sweetened the flavor, trimmed the rind and miniaturized...

To the naked eye, it looks like a fleck of tile decorated with the Greek letters alpha and omega. But when it is magnified by a factor of 600, its true nature becomes evident -- the world's most portable copy of the New Testament. According to the...

June 9, 2003, Monday

In the race to make computer chips that are ever faster and ever smaller, scientists at Harvard University have grown tiny crystal rods of silicon and other semiconductors, then sluiced them onto chips to form rudimentary circuits that perform basic...

In an advance that presages the tiniest of computer circuitry possible, researchers at Lucent Technologies have built a transistor in which the layer that switches currents on and off is only one molecule thick. Dr. J. Hendrik Schön, a research...